Kashmir Hill has experimented with cutting out tech giants from her life. In week 5 she found out what it was like to remove Apple.

In addition to abandoning all my iProducts, I am blocking myself from interacting with Apple in any way, using a custom VPN designed for me by technologist Dhruv Mehrotra. The VPN prevents my devices from communicating with the 16,777,216 IP addresses controlled by Apple, rendering iCloud and any Apple apps defunct.

It’s an interesting experiment, especially going so far as to block Apple IP addresses. I look forward to Ms. Hill’s next experiment: Blocking Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all at once.

NASA’s Mars rovers are amazing and so very cool, which is why it’s awesome the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released open source plans so you can build your own. The plans show you how to build a scaled down version of the Curiosity rover with off the shelf parts. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi for the rover’s brain, some mechanical skills, and a lot of spare time. JPL says you should plan on spending at least 200 hours on the project, plus the parts will cost about US$2,500. It’s worth it because in the end you’ll have your own rover and you can modify it any way you like.

Every year since 2014, NASA has published a software catalog, On Wednesday NASA released a software catalog with over 1,000 free code samples. The free code is divided into 15 categories like robotics, aeronautics, climate simulators, biological sensors and guidance systems. Although the code is free, some restrictions may apply. For some, any U.S. citizen can apply to use it. Others can only be used by other federal agencies. And there is even some open-source code in the catalog. Open-source code can be directly downloaded, but most others require you to create an account, or in some cases sign a government contract or a usage agreement. If you’re in the sciences or like to tinker at home, be sure to check out this year’s NASA catalog.

After several years of switching the code, Google made the iOS Chrome browser open source. For the past several years the Chrome team has been updating the code in order to bring it under the Chromium Project. Since iOS browsers must use Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, the app had to support that as well as Google’s Blink engine.